That's semantics. You have a different ideas of the fixes that should have been applied so you call them changes instead of fixes. Good, you know how to use a thesaurus

, but it still means they did try multiple times to fix it.
Your fix would still have resulted in people cranking out stone axes (until they found a fire axe), just by far not that many. But then they would have built lots of fire axes (until they found a steel fire axe). Now I'm sure you have a fix in mind to fix this some more and after lots of iteration we might arrive at something you might have arrived at as lead designer. But would TFP have liked that as well?